DDE

Alternative proposal: in the final act of Episode IX, Rey goes back to 32 BBY, and massacres a large portion of Mos Eisly, including a certain Anakin Skywalker. She then goes on to preach a, shall we say, non-binary anti-Jedi religion that grants its adepts superpowers in direct defiance of midichlorian lore. SUBVERSION!

Russia does seem to have an obsession with teletanks, though. Don’t forget the more advanced competitors that kill the motor and pop a parachute if the target shuts off its radar.

Not if you're looking to conduct area suppression with delay-fused frag/shrapnel shells.

If anything, a slower trajectory simplifies things for the lander. Maybe 350 if you were to resurrect the esoteric field of deep-space high-energy chemical rocketry that right about died with the Saturn V probe concepts. After all, someone was insane enough to bubble ClF3 through liquid fluorine. No, I'm not letting go of insane chemistry. The touted upper limit of storeables is somewhere in the 380-400 range planned for the RD-5xx series using peroxide and pentaborane, beryllium hydride, or a hydrazine-beryllium gel. Yes, I've come across Glushko's correspondence asking for a new site at which he could fire those.

That gives me an idea. How much dV can you bleed off by cryolithobraking?

Beauty is only skin-deep.

*ponders a Curiosity-style skyhook carrying a CASABA-HOWITZER charge to blast through the ice*

I don’t think it’s even controversial at this point.

TFA was a ripoff, not a deconstruction. And they appear to be booting Subversion Master Rian entirely, even taking away his planned other SW trilogy. I think this may be dangerously correct, if comically exaggerated. There was an aborted novel arc that tried to tie SW humans to Earth. ...this is going to end with Rey in Times Square, isn’t it?

ULA has LockMart and Boeing behind them. They’re virtually unsinkable so long as there even a slight chance of them returning to profitability in the mid-term.

Basically, they overexaggerate it by making the usual “that’s merely what they tell the public about” assumption. Some sources posit that the mere spectrum of Prompt Global Strike caused a major organizational refit that led to the Aerospace Forces. Similarily, the assumption voiced is that the US missile shield is either a) capable of being scaled up to completely neutralize Russia’s ICBMs, hence the increased effort to create weapons capable of using unconventional trajectories, and simultaneously b) is used as cover to build nuclear and conventional first-strike capability that would allow for a winnable offensive nuclear war against Russia, prompting the creation of unorthodox solutions like the “third-strike” Status-6 torpedo. At this point, the Pentagon has been tacitly confirming its existence - and the claims are of flight tests, with some anonymous sauces going so far as to claim multiple crashes of flight articles.

Last Thursday Putin made his last state of the nation address this term. The unexpected second half of the address can be summed up as the following: Among a menagerie of superweapons presented was the RS-28 Sarmat heavy ICBM with Yu-71 Avangard maneuvering reentry vehicles (surprising no-one) and a nuclear turbojet-propelled cruise missile (which, as far as past actions go, surprised everyone). These do present a tangible boon to Venus exploration, as I’ll detail towards the end. First, some ground rules: We’re talking about the missile and not about Putin; the thread slipping into political flaming will send us all off to the Gulag, so don’t do it We, however, charitably assume that the retired KGB lieutenant-colonel isn’t lying While the information on the turbojet is extremely sketchy, the past lack of evidence or international furore suggests it’s not a fallout-spewing death machine. One would expect broad-spectrum nuclear contamination above Scandinavia, both from a running Project Pluto jet and from crashed “hot” reactors. Instead, what we get is a burst of ruthenium in the Urals, and a minor, elisive spike of iodine-131 that USAF promptly threw its best CBRN recon platform at. Similar to the Moon landing, you wouldn’t expect the other side to keep quiet. This is consistent with past Soviet developments, though. One is the reactor ejection and recovery system envisioned for the ASW variant of An-12, and the other was previously considered for the atomic Tu-95 - a closed-cycle jet with no exposure of the core to outside air. Lack of air inside the core makes operating the reactor immensely easier - NERVA designers got a lot of grey hair trying to factor in the neutron moderation properties of the propellant flow. This also means the nuclear turbojet can safely operate with media other than Earth air. We know full well that turbojets can’t operate on Venus - chemical turbojets. Many KSPers have toiled with electric propellers on Eve, and some did resort to Project Pluto. Separately, Russia’s Venera-D probe is progressing at a snail’s pace, with the primary aim of building a lander that will last 24 hours. That... isn’t terribly ambitious. What if we injected some old-school Apollo coсk-jousting and armed Venera-D with a cruise missile? Currently, studies of Venus atmospheric missions are dominated by advanced derivatives of VeGa baloon probes. These can last for a while depending on the power source, but they are at the mercy of the wind and the initial deployment location. A high subsonic cruise missile-derived drone would cover infinitely more ground throughout a lifetime comparable to most competing aerobots, with a reliable energy budget from its propulsion system. The requisite core capabilities are implicit in the weapons systems being presented. Aside from the nuclear powerplant, the intercontinental cruise missile/loitering munition would have to be capable of advanced autonomouc operations and even threat charecterization, which is crucial because it would only get brief comm windows with Earth. Meanwhile, the Avangard MARV by necessity provides experience with aerodynamic deceleration in aggressive reentry modes, and with precise autonomous navigation and maneuvering in said reentry modes - a Venus aerobot won’t be able to rely on GLONASS. So, does this cloud of fallout has a silver lining?

Lightsaber and blaster wounds auto-cauterize. Yes, direct your complaints to the bad sci-fi thread. At least some irony would be found in Rey the Sith vs Kylo the Jedi, but I wouldn’t expect them to take such a deep approach. Problem is, Rian made sure to leave no sequel hooks whatsoever. Although a fairly obvious plot hole that needs urgent plugging is the hyperspace tracker. Which every Imperial ship has.

Not exactly. It’s Ares IV - whereas having the separate Ares V and either a mature Ares I or Commercial Crew would have saved a lot of hassle.

When you’re building a strategic missile, a Chernobyl at the destination is a feature, not a bug.

If your craft is big enough, you can use radio during reentry - just coming from above. Terminal active radio guidance is something the Pershing MARV had. Hypersonic jet. That's basically the Me-163 - or, if we dig into the Soviet files, the Bereznyak-Isaev BI-1, preceded by several of Korolev's rocket gliders. Nitric acid oxidizer, pretty advanced for its age, and it was starting ground tests by the time of Operation Barbarossa. Wooden aircraft were nothing unusual back then, though.

Which is why the latest attempt to make a supersonic business jet is aimed at sheikhs. https://www.rbc.ru/society/13/11/2017/5a095c0d9a7947768772759a

And nether of them die from the radioactive fusion reactor.

It can get worse. Geostorm is a warning. From THEM. [Video removed by moderator because it contains bad language]

Noobs.

Or their mug is tougher than most helmets.

Brace for the puns.

@StarStreak2109, stop making me ashamed of not elucidating enough on my own points. Agitprop. Never forget that Musk is driving a hype train; I'm not sure what SpaceX would have been without it.

Why have I wasted decades of my life establishing plausible cover, Stierlitz thought.

@Reactordrone, sounds familiar. Because, as @kerbiloid said, it's still quite alive. http://eurasian-defence.ru/node/2626 ShPU Mozyr terminal ABM system appears to be the counter to the loss of survivability caused by reusing the very expensive missile silos over decades.